by James L. May
“I’d heard students could make connections,” I said. “I went when I could. Not often.”
“Of course. Everyone knows you can’t get anywhere without connections. I don’t blame you.” The Chekist shivered and rubbed his arms. “Brrr. Come on. Too cold to stand still.”
He took a place at my side, hands clasped behind his back. “And so you and Antonov struck up a little acquaintance, got to know each other,” said the Chekist. “You became friendly. Where did you have your little talks?”
“Sometimes I stopped by the museum to watch him work in the evenings. If I had the time after supper.”
“And those were the only times you saw him?”
I swallowed. “The only times.”
“Hmmm. Antonov did something with those icons, isn’t that it?” He paused for me to nod. “Some members of the Party object to that kind of thing. Why spend effort on the paraphernalia of the religious delusion? It’s like putting lamps and opium pipes on display.”
He shrugged. “But that’s not what I think. It’s all part of the study of history. Of anthropology, even. Marx is clear about this. We’re the results of a historical process, so why not keep in mind what came before?”
He began kicking his boots through the snow now, throwing puffs of it up into the wind and moving a little ahead. “For instance, there’s a monograph to be written by someone—not me—on the miracles icons were supposed to work. If religion is a delusion, a miracle must be a hallucination, eh?”
He continued kicking for a moment, then spun around so abruptly that I nearly walked into him. He placed a hand on my chest, giving me a sharp push. Stepping backwards to regain my balance, I bumped into Razdolski’s hard body.
“You lied to me just now,” said the Chekist.
“What do you mean?”
“You met Antonov in the Company Ten dormitories. The other week.”
“That—it was only for a moment,” I said. “I barely—”
He cut me off. “You didn’t want to mention that you’d gone into a building off-limits to you.”
The kremlin wall stood to my left, its giant stones cold and crusted with snow. My teeth had begun to chatter. Clenching my jaw only moved the trembling to my throat.
All the friendliness had gone out of the Chekist’s voice. “What were you doing in the Company Ten dormitories?” he said.
It all would have been better if I’d been wearing a warm scarf. A former cellmate of mine, a housebreaker from Rostov, had once given me this advice: always wear your coat when they interrogate you. If you’re cold, he’d said, you’ll be paying attention to that instead of what you’re saying; you’ll lose track of your story.
It almost made me laugh, this man’s having waited for me to get chilled through before asking his difficult questions. Didn’t he know how much I was in his power? The cat-and-mouse routine was ludicrous, unnecessary. For the first time that morning I felt angry. Less at the injustice of it, perhaps, than at the extravagance.
“I might be able to tell you what you want to know if I had the faintest idea of what this is about. What’s Gennady Antonov done? Why bring me here?”
Like that, the breath exploded from my lungs. My knees fluttered out of existence. It feels like you’ll die, being punched in the solar plexus.
“Shut up,” the Chekist said quickly. “I am asking questions now. What else are you keeping to yourself? What did you talk about with Antonov?”
The snow burned against my cheek. It was a minute before I could push myself up, much less wheeze out an answer. “Nothing,” I finally said. “Food—he gave me a little food. That’s all.”
“Why?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. Pity, maybe.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Icons. That’s all—all he ever talked about.”
“Tell me about the food he gave you.”
“Porridge. A bowl of porridge, and a strip of haddock. And a quarter of an onion. I stayed long enough to eat the porridge, then I left. You can—” I took too deep a breath and started to cough. “You can hit me again, but that’s all I can tell you.”
The Chekist crossed his arms. “Well, Guard Razdolski. He invites me to hit him again. Is this backbone, or stupidity? He sounds sincere. Shall I hit him again?”
I managed to look back at Razdolski, who shrugged. He was scratching the back of his left leg.
“Come on,” said the Chekist, “both of you.”
For the rest of the way he was silent. The path took us around the corner of the kremlin, then down a gentle hill to the bay, where the quay began about forty yards from the walls. The dirty white facade of the main administration building loomed over us, set back from the water and parallel to the wharf. At the far end, a group of men stood in a group around something on the ground. We made our way towards them.
Closer to the water, logs were stacked in pyramids. The whole camp had mobilized to produce lumber during October, in anticipation of the sea’s finally freezing at the end of the month; it was the last chance for Administration to bring up the year’s production levels. In quaratine we’d done hard labor among the trees for the past three weeks.
Some of the waiting logs might even have been ones I cut myself, arranged into these monuments along the water. They would have to be loaded onto a ship soon, but for now the quay was empty.
It hadn’t been easy to meet the quotas. Even the invalids ranked Class 2 Fit, who weren’t normally approved for heavy work, had had to cut wood. When I’d arrived, I’d wondered whether it would be a good idea to get myself sorted into Class 2. Now I was glad I hadn’t. Their rations hadn’t increased to match their assignment. We watched them waste away before our eyes.
The crowd of men parted as we drew near. Before I’d had time to take in what lay before us, the Chekist said: “At any rate, here we are. To answer the question you posed a minute ago: I’ve brought you here to look at this corpse. A drowning. Found floating in the bay last night.”
It was, of course, Gennady Antonov.
2
There. The body signals that things have begun, doesn’t it, in a mystery story? What I’m writing down is a mystery, then, a detektiv. Here is the body, at the beginning.
My new neighbor, Vasily-the-tank-commander, was the one who suggested I might write something about my time in the camps, those thirty years ago. A memoir, he called it. “A record of what you witnessed. We know next to nothing about what it was like in the early years.”
But Vasily is an idiot. Vasily-the-tank-commander thinks commanding tanks in the war against the Germans taught him something about our national character—about human desires. “Russians are burning to hear the truth, Anatoly Pavelovich,” he says. “Humankind burns for the truth!” Vasily is a Party member. He has had read to him a speech of Khrushchev’s that says Stalin was less than great, and thinks things will be different. What happened to me back then matters now, according to him.
Idiocy, worthy of an idiot. Humankind doesn’t want truth. If it did, mystery novels would end as soon as they began. “Citizen X was killed by Criminal Y for reason Z. The End.” Why withhold it, if the truth mattered at all? The writer knows the answer, doesn’t he? Just as I know, now, who killed Gennady Antonov.
No, what humankind wants is not truth. Humankind wants a body.
And this is the lesson of my experiences in the camps as well.
Antonov’s body lay curled up on the wharf like an ear. The legs with their knees drawn up to the belly, the bowed spine connected to the bent neck: they made the lobe and the outer volute, while the hands crabbed before his chest suggested ridges spiraling inward. His clothing and long hair, wet after being fished out of the water, had frozen to the stones of the quay.
It was now past sunrise, turning into what in October we called a fine morning on Solovki: gray clouds with
the sun showing through at moments, a strong wind blowing in off the freezing sea to the west. On the south side of the bay, a shelf of ice had begun to creep out from the shore. The deeper water here by the quay was only cloudy. The wavelets lapped slow and slippery against the stone.
The Chekist had been gone for an hour or more. After a few cursory questions about whether I recognized the body (I did) and whether I knew how it had come to be floating in the bay (I didn’t), he’d left me and Guard Razdolski behind with strict instructions that I was neither to go anywhere nor to interfere with anything. Gradually the little crowd had moved away as well, casting dubious looks in my direction. Now Razdolski stood a short distance from Antonov’s corpse, arms crossed and the gun dangling off his shoulder, only unbending from time to time in order to scratch his chest or beard and sniff his dirty fingernails.
Antonov wore trousers, boots, and a sweater, but no coat or hat. The posture was rigor mortis—that much I knew from having had, in the Lubyanka, an elderly cellmate whose expiration we only noticed when he failed to rouse himself to claim his share of soup.
No, what shocked me about Antonov’s corpse wasn’t the posture, but the face. It was pink, bright as if painted. Only the week before, he’d been explaining the polychrome technique to me. The medieval artists who used it were not, he said, bound to slavishly imitate the colors they found in nature. Instead they chose pigments in obedience to whatever laws of sacred beauty tradition had revealed. Skin might be green or light blue, the sky ocher, the ocean black, the leaves of a tree gray or gold.
Now, with a magenta face, Antonov might as well have fallen victim to the technique himself.
Where I stood at the end of the wharf, the bay lay between me and the southern portion of the kremlin; you could have drawn a secant line across the irregular curve of the water’s edge and connected me with the Holy Gates. Their portico was overlooked by a collection of windows in different shapes: a big demilune, the squares of casements. Each opened into what had been the Annunciation Chapel—now the museum.
Gennady Antonov wouldn’t be returning to his workbench there. He’d remain on the quay, stuck to the ground with frozen hair and cloth, until someone moved his body somewhere else.
It always struck me that Antonov was the only person on Solovetsky who really belonged where he’d been placed, among the venerable paintings and pots of glaze. His quiet speaking voice came out of a tufted beard full of crooked teeth; he wore, always, an astrakhan hat and an expression of extreme mildness. Massings connected by thinnesses defined his body and face: thick fingertips and knuckles on slender hands, bulbous nostrils on a long, narrow nose, bulging eyes beneath a fine brow. He’d moved smoothly but unexpectedly, as though the air around him had a different consistency than it did for everyone else.
I’d pinned certain hopes on Antonov. And now, here he was. Drowned, frozen, and magenta. The wind pulled at my cap and stung my ears. I yanked it back down onto my head as best I could, and stomped my feet to keep warm.
Sledges laden with timber had begun to arrive at the landing. The men dragged them in teams, uniform and small at this distance, but assuming odd angles as they strained forward over the muddy road. There was still no ship to receive their loads. Presumably one of the camp’s boats —the Gleb Boky, named after one of the bosses of the OGPU, was used to transport both prisoners and goods, and there were several smaller steamers as well—would be arriving later in the day to take the wood on board.
By now Razdolski and I were the only ones standing at the end of the wharf with Antonov’s body. Some of the sledge-pullers stopped to look out at us before they unloaded at the other end.
I had started to worry about my next meal. If I was still here when the time came for my platoon to line up at the steaming pot at the edge of the trees, Foma and the rest would simply divide my portion between them. That was still hours away, but the Chekist had departed for who knew where, to return who knew when. Some provision might be made for Razdolski, who’d been posted over the body as part of his work assignment, but I doubted he’d share with me.
At least I’d saved a hunk of last night’s bread in the lining of my jacket. I broke it in two, putting one of the pieces in my mouth. It lost its flavor almost immediately, but I chewed until the stuff mashed to paste between my teeth. Then I swallowed, slowly.
You learn to make bread last.
I’d started on the second piece when the tall shape of the Chekist separated itself from the unloading activity at the other end of the quay. Next to him someone propelled himself along with a cane. As they drew closer, this figure resolved into an old man with a large gray mustache. Though I couldn’t place him, he looked familiar.
“Here he is,” said the Chekist as they came to the body.
“Yes.” With his cane, the old man gave Gennady Antonov a light, sad prod. “Here he is.”
“The identity, you see, is not the issue.” The Chekist pulled a cigarette from a cheap northern-manufactured packet and tapped it against one palm. “But we have no coroner. Can you confirm drowning as the cause of death?”
“Perhaps,” said the old man. “Once I’ve examined him.”
“Examine, then.” The Chekist lit his cigarette and threw the wooden match away. “You aren’t bothered by its being an acquaintance, are you, Yakov Petrovich? I assumed this would be a professional matter for you.”
That was who the old man was, then. Antonov’s cellmate, another denizen of the relatively privileged Company Ten.
Such relative differences were important. Even today, with the Gulag governed by the famous principles of “economic rationalization,” which declare that every prisoner shall be fed only in proportion to his contribution to the NKVD’s yearly production plan, successful zeks learn to ferret out inefficiencies, find ways to be rewarded with a full portion of calories for less than a full measure of work. The man who parlays his friendliness with the doctor into a position as a medic, or his schoolboy lessons in arithmetic into a job keeping the accounts: he is the one who lives.
And you must understand: SLON was not yet the Gulag. It was not rational, economically or otherwise. How much more plentiful, then, were the opportunities to find an advantageous arrangement? With the prisoners running and, indeed, systemizing their own prison, administrative positions that could be distributed as the spoils of patronage proliferated. Clerical obligations multiplied as men found ways for themselves and their friends to avoid being murdered by hard labor. The production plan still ruled the island—I suppose that during October of 1926, seven internees out of ten coughed in Solovetsky’s forests and fumbled dangerously with its frozen tools—but its reign was less complete than it would become in even five years’ time. After all, the idea of operating an internment camp on such a large scale was quite new. Our jailers were still working out how best to exploit us.
Hence the companies like Ten, which consisted in the main of prisoners taken up into Solovetsky’s (bloated) bureaucratic or (slimmer) professional layers. To receive such a transfer was what all of us in Quarantine’s splintered cots dreamed of—all of us with any acumen or hope of making the necessary connections, anyway. If, by dint of demonstrated competence, ruthlessness, or willingness to butter up those with influence, you got the assignment, your ration would only be a little better than in the labor companies, and you would enjoy no more freedom of movement. But at least your work could be done indoors, without the risk of its leaving you sick or crippled.
I couldn’t recall where this Petrovich worked, but I’d met him once before—on the occasion the Chekist had been interrogating me about, in fact, when Antonov had brought me to their cell to collect the haddock and fragment of onion.
It had been a brief encounter. I’d remembered his name only because it was slightly odd. Yakov Petrovich Petrovich: the surname was the same as the patronymic. He was the oldest man I’d seen in the camp, above seventy, at least. T
he mustache occupied a thin, wrinkled face. In the same way, certain dilapidated squares are dominated by statues from before the Revolution.
“I am observing the scene,” said Petrovich. “I am thinking. This is how a detective works. Basic investigative method.”
The Chekist laughed. “My organ has its own investigative methods.” He picked a flake of tobacco from his mouth. “And anyway, the body was found in the water. I doubt you’ll learn much from its present situation.”
“When was he found?”
“This morning, early. Between 4:00 and 4:30. The prisoner assigned to clean the administration building’s third floor saw him floating. At first we thought he was a swimmer—he’d drifted into the middle of the bay. A rowboat had to be sent.”
Petrovich nudged Gennady Antonov with his boot, then turned and registered Razdolski and me. The eyes above his mustache were sunken, yes, red-rimmed and watery, certainly—but their blue irises scraped you bare. I nearly looked away when he turned them on me.
“What’s he doing here?” he said to the Chekist.
“He knew your cellmate.”
“Yes, and?”
“Someone had to identify the body.”
“I know you,” the old man said to me. “I’ve seen you before. What are you called? Bogdanov? Bogolyubov?”
